For today’s #transformationtuesdays we’ll talk about an innovation in AI (Artificial Intelligence), particularly Natural Language Processing.
You know when there are big corporate bosses or entrepreneurs who get to delegate tasks to their Assistants such as booking dinner reservations, hair stylist appointments, and other tasks that would require the Assistant to contact other people to complete the task?
What if you had the power to do all that, without having the need to hire a living breathing Assistant, and all you have to do is command your mobile phone to do those kinds if tasks for you. Wouldn’t that be awesome?
Well that’s exactly what I’ll be showing you today.
You see, Google has been busy developing the next generation Google Assistant, where they have injected it with Google Duplex technology to give it the power to make Phone Calls on your behalf.
Some of you may already know this, but for those who aren’t aware of the existence this technology yet, I’ll share with you (1) The Demo when it was launched, so you know how it works, and (2) Where it is being applied now, and where it will be used next.
And for those who want to know what goes on inside these kinds of Chat Bots, and where Natural Language Processing and AI comes into play, then I’ll break down the bits and pieces for you so you’ll get a better understanding.
Let’s go!
If you haven’t seen the Google Assistant + Google Duplex Launch and Demo yet, now is the time to see it. Otherwise, you’re missing half of your life.
Isn’t it amazing that it’s as if you have this little creature living inside your mobile phone whom you can command to make dinner reservations on your behalf?
That launch video was in May of 2018. Fast forward to today, as per this article by Android Authority in October 2019 (which also talks about how you can activate it so give it a read), Google Duplex is now available in 48 States in the US, and has recently been rolled-out in New Zealand.
Now if you’ve read thus far, you’re probably curious about how Chat Bots like these work, and where Natural Language Processing comes into play.
It’s actually a combination of the following:
- Voice Recognition – How this works is that when you speak into your phone’s microphone, it converts your spoken voice into waveforms, which are basically images of sound. That’s how software algorithms are better able to tell the difference between words like “where,” “were,” and “we’re.” And then it turns that information into Text.
- Natural Language Processing – I’ve written a separate article that defines NLP, along with various examples, that could demystify this for you. But in essence, it takes the text information from the voice recognition piece, identifies the context, then provides an appropriate response, in text.
- Text to Speech – This is pretty much like Voice Recognition but in reverse. So it takes the text information from the Natural Language Processing piece and converts it to a waveform that when played, sounds like a voice conversation.
So in its basic form, a Chat Bot can start out as a very elaborate script, where you take the most common things that a human would say, and the Chat Bot would process that information and provide a pre-programmed response.
But if you add a Machine Learning algorithm to it, you can give it more information in the form of training data, it will learn how to adapt to new conversations it hasn’t encountered before, and adapt accordingly based on what it has experienced in the past i.e. based on the training data.
Training data can be composed of information that’s already been labeled by humans.
For example, if the input is a question like “Do you think I should go to the gym today, or sleep in?” The training data can have information on sentiment (e.g. anger, disgust, fear, happy, sad, surprise, neutral) and what the common human responses are to a question like this.
And then you add Voice Recognition to the input side, and Text to Speech on the output side, make all of them work simultaneously, and you’ve got yourself a Chat Bot that has the ability to make Phone Calls on your behalf.
Ending Note
I hope you found this to be of value, and gave you a sense of how Natural Language Processing is being applied in real-world scenarios.
If you have any questions, reply with a comment. I’d love to hear from you.
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